Page 8 of The Witches of Cambridge

CHAPTER FIVE

At Lilith House, Ava and Lauren were given small rooms with windows that overlooked the back garden and a connecting closet they set up as a meeting space, with candles on the shelves where sweaters were stored and magic books piled up beside the shoes. The rooms were painted white, but the ceilings were black, decorated with painted silver stars. If you turned out the lights, the stars would brighten, almost as if you were looking straight at heaven and the walls and windows didn’t exist.

Radcliffe students residing in dorms took their meals in their dining rooms and were served by Irish maids from East Cambridge and Central Square, hired help who also cleaned their rooms and washed and folded their laundry. After dinner, they would play charades or mah-jongg in the parlor, and when the games were over, the housemothers would lecture them on manners, to ensure there would be no confusion about what was expected of a Radcliffe woman. On weekend evenings there would be jolly-ups, mixers that were cheerful get-togethers with Harvard students. But women belonging to the Lilith Society had no schedule to follow, other than the Sunday meeting. Members were encouraged to take jobs and be self-sufficient, no matter how late they stayed out. Ava had signed up to be a waitress at Eliot House, one of the twelve residential dorms at Harvard for sophomore, junior, and senior men, set near the river and known as a prep house for sons of the elite.

Lauren had found a position at the Harvard Museum of Natural History as a visitors’ guide. She quickly discovered the job was all wrong for her, for it included being polite to the tourists who came flocking through, often with unruly children in tow, there to gawk at the glass cases of specimens, the lion and the whale and soulful orangutans, all of them captured over a hundred years earlier. Lauren had little interest in the fabulous glass flowers exhibition, with its life-size botanical models, commissioned in 1886 by the director of Harvard’s Botanical Museum and created by the German father and son glassblowers Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. She recited the same descriptions over and over, which made the magic of the glass fade, and when she walked past the specimens all she could see was the ragged black thread left behind by the taxidermists.

The head custodian, a fellow named Tim Randall, made certain to keep his eye on Lauren, who he thought to be a slacker, for she often left paper coffee cups near the exhibits, and Randall suspected her of sticking chewing gum under the exhibition cases. He was a large man who rode a bike to work and believed Harvard students to be pretentious babies. He was always the first one at the museum and the last one to leave, and he felt he was the true caretaker of the treasures within. He didn’t trust the students to understand the importance of all the museum had to offer, and he certainly didn’t trust Lauren, who was snippy when she spoke to him.

“You’re leaving fingerprints on the glass,” he told her.

“They’re not mine. The visitors do that. And the schoolchildren.”

“I’ve seen you touching the glass.” Randall was quick to accuse in a hostile tone, even though he, too, didn’t care for the wild groups of children who ran through the halls on school visits and devoured their messy peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while sitting on the floor in the dinosaur room. All the same, he’d noticed Lauren carelessly leaning on the glass cases as she wrote in a notebook. After twenty years of working at the museum, he took pride in the exhibitions, almost as if they belonged to him. “I know what I’ve seen,” Randall said.

“Then you would have seen this.” Lauren held up her left hand, which had the extra finger, even though she had been taught better. Show no one, tell no one, trust no one. She didn’t care; she wanted to prove him wrong. “I would have left eleven fingerprints, not ten.”

Randall wasn’t impressed by her odd hand. “It was you,” he insisted. “And you smoke in the bathroom.”

Lauren dreaded guiding rowdy groups of schoolchildren through the exhibitions. “I’d rather work with you,” she told Ava, who couldn’t help but smirk at the notion of Lauren working in a dining room.

By now Ava could tell a rich girl at a glance, those who had never had jobs or been forced to do chores, who wore designer clothes, patent leather shoes. They were the private school girls, girls from the Upper East Side or Beacon Hill or Brattle Street. Girls with backgrounds much like Lauren’s. Wealthy families, entitlement, a certain look of belonging. “You’d be willing to carry a tray?” Ava mocked.

“You’d be the one carrying the tray. I’d be entertained by all the boys who were falling in love with me.”

“You think a lot of yourself,” Ava pointed out with a grin. Despite herself, she found Lauren amusing and admired her grit.

“You think very little of yourself,” Lauren shot back. While Ava was considering this, Lauren went on to wonder, “Is it possible that we’re both wrong?”

Three hundred years earlier, before the river and marshes were drained to create more pastures for new settlers, the byway that led from Eliot House to Harvard Square had been called Water Street, and anyone who wished to traverse this boggy crossing was forced to wear thigh-high boots, for it was easy to sink into the muck. The air was always damp, and gnats circled in the green-tinged air. Ava arrived for her first night of waitressing only to find the door to Eliot House locked, as it always was, to make certain outsiders remained where they belonged. Eliot House had been modeled after buildings at Oxford and Cambridge, with three open courtyards, a glorious dorm for upperclassmen.

All freshmen lived in the dorms in Harvard Yard, an area surrounded by twenty-five wrought-iron gates that could be locked if need be. Some gates were decorated with metal leaves and vines, some gave the illusion of being hedges and trees, some turned gold as the sun went down. They were often given as a graduating class’s gift to the school, but initially their presence was meant to keep out evil: wolves and thieves and witches alike. Harvard students, all of whom were studying for the ministry, buried glass witch bottles around the perimeters of the buildings. The bottles, filled with urine and human hair, along with red thread and pins, as well as thin snow-white bones, were meant to stop a witch from entering their rooms.

Ava stood outside Eliot House with its many doors, wondering how she would ever make her way in Cambridge when she couldn’t even manage to find the correct entrance to the dining hall. Perhaps the witch bottles still buried around the building led to her confusion and stopped her from entering. At last, another waitress arrived, a girl named Maureen Healy, who had broken a heel running over from the bus stop on Mass Ave. She had glossy brown hair and was considered a knockout, but she felt lackluster right now when comparing herself to Ava. “You got lucky with that red hair of yours,” she said. “I admit I’m jealous.”

“I’ve always hated it,” Ava told her. The girls in Genesis had raced after her calling Liar, liar, pants on fire.

“Hate yourself and everyone else will agree with you,” Maureen warned her. Then she added, “I think we have something in common.” She held up her hand, and there it was, the eleventh finger.

“You’re one of us?”

“There are women like us all over Cambridge, more per square mile than anywhere else, except for London and Edinburgh. Maybe Paris, but they stay hidden, even from us.”

“I thought most of us removed our extra finger.”

“My mother would never do that. She’s always told me that I should be who I am.” Maureen lowered her voice. “Though she warned me not to share that information with those who despise us.”

Maureen had grown up in Central Square with a mother who was a midwife. The family had come over from Ireland at the turn of the century and had always practiced the Nameless Art, focusing on women’s health. For that reason the Healys’ phone number was often in the hands of Radcliffe girls who had found themselves in trouble. Diaphragms were outlawed for single women, and the birth control pill was still being tested on rabbits and rats in Harvard labs. Many Radcliffe students had to decide between expulsion and marriage when they discovered they were pregnant. Those who didn’t know about Mrs. Healy often made arrangements to meet a stranger in Harvard Square who would blindfold them, then drive them to an office where someone who might or might not be a doctor proceeded to terminate the pregnancy, a dangerous and terrifying decision for a woman who had few choices.

Maureen had followed in her mother’s and grandmother’s footsteps and was currently attending nursing school at Mt. Auburn Hospital. She waitressed in the evenings to earn extra cash, and Harvard was a good employer. She nodded to the door of Eliot House as she and Ava stood side by side. Two witches wearing black dresses who didn’t belong.

“Knock three times,” Maureen said. “Then say ‘Abracadabra’ and you’ll find yourself in a strange new world of the rich and the soon to be richer.”

They both laughed but immediately slapped on solemn expressions when the door was hastily unlatched by an older waitress who had very little patience with the latecomers and young women who stood around joking,

“Goodness, Maureen, where have you been?” the older woman said, eyeing Ava as she spoke. Young and beautiful and a student, which meant it was likely she wouldn’t know the first thing about waitressing.

“I found our new helper lingering outside,” Maureen teased.